Matthew Vaughn's Kick-Ass is enormously vulgar, brutally violent and wholly inappropriate for young children. It is also hysterically funny, surprisingly heartfelt and outrageously entertaining. Its R-rating - wholly deserved, incidentally - and lack of ticket-price-inflating 3D mean it doesn't have a chance of dethroning the year's box office champs but anyone who equates commercial success with quality is just a dumbass of the highest order, so pay no mind to that.
Instead, pay attention to this: Kick-Ass is not only the most fun you'll have in a movie theatre this year, it also might just be the best super hero movie ever made. Again, it's definitely not for everyone - and definitely not for young kids - but as I sit here drawing up a list of superhero cinema high water marks there's not a single one that I'd choose over Kick-Ass. Not Supes, not Spidey, certainly not the X-Men, not even the Nolan incarnation of Batman. Kick-Ass quite simply does.
The story - like you could possibly have missed it with the omnipresent ad campaign - goes like this. Geeky teen Dave Lizewski (Aaron Johnson) gets to wondering why nobody has ever donned a costume and tried this super hero thing for real. So he does. And he ends up in hospital. So he tries it again. And this time he ends up on YouTube and becomes a massive sensation, triggering copycats while also attracting the attention of a pair of real - as in highly trained, very skilled and uber violent - underground vigilantes along with a local crime lord.
No offense to Johnson and his portrayal of the title character but Kick-Ass himself is not the reason to see this film. Sure, he's fine. Better than fine, really. He's actually really, really good. But the Kick-Ass story line is one we've seen before - a standard hero origin that hits all the beats you expect, albeit with a little more blood and sex, and better comedy than usual. If this was just the story of Kick-Ass himself this would still be a superior film but not the opus that it is. No, the reasons to see this film are Nicolas Cage and Chloe Moretz (only twelve years old at the time the film was shot) as the father-daughter vigilante duo of Big Daddy and Hit Girl. Good god, these two are instant icons.
Put away your Cage-hate for a moment. Yes, he has spent years earning your hatred but he was good before that and, dammit, he's on a roll and becoming good once again. Cage's Bad Lieutenant performance was a gonzo masterpiece and he builds on that here with a deliciously odd, surprisingly endearing bit as a former cop turned revenge-driven killer teetering on the brink of madness thanks to his false imprisonment and the suicide of his wife, events brought on by the local crime lord he has sworn to kill. Coming with him is his twelve year old daughter, a girl he has trained up as a killer from her earliest childhood, the entire process transformed into a game for the child thanks to dad's penchant for dressing up and pretending to be superheros. These are Big Daddy and Hit Girl - a lethal, bloodthirsty duo.
Playing Hit Girl is Chloe Moretz, a pre-teen dynamo about to become a major, major star. She's already got some other big roles in the pipeline - she stars in the upcoming English remake of hit Swedish vampire film Let The Right One In - but even if she didn't, Kick-Ass would be her sure fire ticket to fame. Moretz doesn't just steal the scenes she's in; she casts a sort of Hit Girl afterglow over the entire film, her presence filling the entire picture whether she's actually on screen or not. Hit Girl is almost solely responsible for the film's R-rating and there's something both perverse and incredibly appealing in watching this kid spout lines that'd make a grown man blush before unleashing bloody fury on her targets. More than the shock value of the dialogue, though, Moretz is the one that puts a human face on things and gives the film the heart that ultimately will elevate the film beyond 'pleasant diversion' status to 'lasting classic'. Because no matter how nasty her mouth is, no matter how fast and sharp her blade, Moretz never forgets that Hit Girl is still a twelve year old girl trying to come to terms with tragedy.
Enough of this now. Stop reading about the film. Go see it.